American women have begun cropping up in unlikely places - in the conservative reaches of politics and at the helm of the National Rifle Association, in extremist militia groups and on the talk shows of the most virulent antiliberal, and antifeminist, radio hosts in the nation.

Despite feminist predictions that women's liberation would forge a national sisterhood dancing to a liberal beat, women in growing numbers are declaring themselves to be strong, invincible and enemies of the very movement that empowered them.

Elinor Burkett, a pioneer in women's studies, spent two years on the road meeting the vanguard of this counter-women's movement in order to write The Right Women. She interviewed the shooting stars of national politics, identifiable leaders such as Elizabeth Dole, Bay Buchanan and Helen Chenoweth - and the stars-to-be, twentysomethings who are bold, brash and brazenly right wing.

She walked the halls of academia with politically incorrect college students and faculty, visited the homes of gun-toting militiawomen in Montana and listened to the lonely Abolitionists - African-American conservative women intent on doing away with every program liberals ever designed to help them. You will meet these women, and dozens more, whose voices have been curiously absent from the national discussion, on the pages of this book.

The Right Women is neither an attack on feminism nor a defense of antifeminism, but a travelogue through the lives of women who are rewriting women's history with the choices they make about careers, marriage, childbearing, fashion, television and voting. Burkett argues that while they are forging new relationships with institutions that liberal feminism has written off as hopelessly patriarchal, these women are not turning their backs on the ideals of the women's movement.

Instead, they are living up to those ideals by refusing to march in lockstep with anyone - even their so-called sisters. Their refusal to live the lives their feminist forebears prescribed for them is the fruit of the very movement they are rejecting.